After Mass on Christmas morning, we drove over to Chester for
lunch with our son’s in-laws, listening to Classic FM as we went. The 114
miles took a hundred minutes (my wife was driving), and we had Christmas music
all the way – carols, pieces from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Handel’s
Messiah (‘Unto us a child is born’ twice). It was a joy, and if there
were no shepherds ‘abiding in the fields’ as we climbed to 1,200 feet over
the Pennine moors, glowing as they were in the winter sunshine, it did not
matter. Once it would have been the same on the BBC, but I suppose that, now
political correctness reigns, it would be thought discourteous to other faiths
to make more than what seems to be just a passing reference to the birth of
Christ.

Miserere

But for many of us the Christian festivals are marked not just
by the words of worship in church but by music too. Once at St Stephen’s
House, Oxford, I heard for the first time Allegri’s wonderful Miserere Mei,
sung by the excellent college choir. Written for use in the Sistine Chapel, it
only reached a wider public after Mozart had worshipped there and then
transcribed it from memory afterwards. I know of no piece of Lenten music that
so combines the deep sorrow for sins committed with the soaring cadences of the
trebles declaring the joy of the good news that God has wiped the slate clean.

Since retirement I have been able to return to singing after 35
years abstinence, now as a bass rather than a tenor. The special choir at St
Luke’s, York, is not a northern version of the Monteverdi Choir, but we do try
our best, and were even able to attempt Fauré’s Requiem. It is true
that we were helped in the solo parts by a soprano who formerly sang in a
cathedral choir and a bass from Opera North (now at Mirfield), both members of
the congregation. Again, the beautiful Agnus Dei by Fauré has within it
a confident and restful assurance that the Lamb of God does indeed take away our
sins.

But we also have provided music of a different sort, with a diet
of spirituals at one Sunday Mass. As with Fauré and Allegri, the hauntingly
beautiful Steal away to Jesus carries God’s promise that even if ‘we
ain’t got long to stay here’, we shall be with him in the end. Like ritual
and preaching (just as media sources like newspapers, television, and radio),
music is communication.

New horizons

Thankfully, Anglicans have in recent years widened the musical
possibilities within worship. I suppose it began some forty years ago, with ‘modern’
hymns like those of Patrick Appleford, with their hints of 40s musicals (and
nothing wrong with that). Then Lord of the Dance, even though I now find
it grates,seemed to hit a different note and perhaps opened the way to
Graham Kendrick and others to write hymns and tunes that brighten up our praise
of God.

It might have been revolutionary in the 1970s to use (as we did
once at St Peter’s, Bushey Heath) a Swedish modern jazz recording of Shall
we gather at the river? during the Mass, but my wife and I would now feel
cheated at St Luke’s York when we sing Amazing grace if it were not
accompanied by the organist playing jazz piano. It is good not only because it
is done very well but because it communicates and uplifts.

Hope in B minor

Yet there is for me no one quite like Johann Sebastian Bach for
expressing the glory and the mystery of God in music, though I have never had
the opportunity to bring a choir and orchestra into church for Easter Day for
what would be for me the ultimate Bach experience. For there is in the Mass
in B minor a moment in which the triumph of good over evil, of light over
darkness, of the glory of God over the sin of the world is expressed as in no
other medium of communication.

That is in the Credo, when the Crucifixus solemnly
fades into nothing as gradually the life leaves the body of the dying Saviour.
Silence. Then orchestra and choir trumpet the victory over death and sin in Et
Resurrexit, through which the genius of Bach communicates the Good News more
vividly that anything else I know in music or art. To begin the Eucharist of
Easter Day with that is an ambition I fear I shall never achieve.

For the solemn Three Hours of Good Friday I have over many years
established an unbreakable ritual. If I am not preaching at a Three Hours
somewhere, I don’t go to church. Instead, I listen at home to one of the Bach Passions,
St Matthew and St John on alternate years, and every year it is somehow a new
revelation of the mystery of the Passion.

Sometimes at the theatre a director will use the very minimum of
scenery and let the words create in the imagination of the audience the
pictorial context in which a play is set. Bach does precisely that in his music.
There is the baying crowd screaming ‘Crucify! Crucify!’, the scornful Pilate
refusing to change the words written on the cross, the series of poignant
chorales after the death of Jesus as the hearts of his followers are torn apart
with their world seeming suddenly to have died with their Master.

And at the end, the sadly confident Chorus, Ruht vohl,
–

‘Lie in peace, sacred body for which I weep no more,

And bring me to my rest.

The grave that is yours holds no further suffering

And for me opens Heaven and closes Hell.’

But beware Muzak

Yet we need to take care. Music can communicate but it can also
inhibit communication. There is a fashion in television documentaries today in
which everything must apparently be overlain by a droning musical accompaniment.
Do they think we cannot take it in without that encouragement? Or is it simply
that music must accompany everything today?

A rather eccentric clergyman told me that he was eating in a
restaurant and became irritated by the continuous pop music that filled the
room. ‘Do we have to have that music with our meal?’ he asked the waiter.
‘Oh, our other customers like it,’ was the reply. My friend came in with the
coup de grace. ‘But there are no other customers today,’ he pointed
out, and reluctantly the music was switched off.

We do need in our worship to get the right balance, not only
between the good, the bad and the ugly, but between that which enhances
communication and that which inhibits it.